Satoshi didn't invent Bitcoin to be a generalist network

Bitcoin deliberately trades speed and scalability for decentralization and security. But contrary to popular myths, this isn't an obstacle to building new Bitcoin-based applications.

Satoshi didn’t invent Bitcoin to be a generalist network — a jack of all trades, master of none. Bitcoin deliberately trades speed and scalability for decentralization and security. But contrary to popular myths, this isn’t an obstacle to building new Bitcoin-based applications.

Slowness is Bitcoin’s strength, not its weakness. And the ‘Building on Bitcoin’ movement will succeed only if devs embrace, inherit Bitcoin’s slow architecture while strategically working ‘around the edges.’

Don’t Try to Change Bitcoin

Bitcoin’s slowness is crucial to its security model and transaction confirmation mechanism.

Instead of relying on centralized intermediaries, Bitcoin achieves trustless transaction finality through Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus, prioritizing security over speed. The resource-intensive and time-consuming PoW provides a computational guarantee to prevent malicious actors from altering Bitcoin’s transaction history.

The 10-minute block confirmation time is thus one of Bitcoin’s core security features, albeit among the most fundamental ones.

A shorter block time would increase the chances of orphaned blocks and forks. Whereas slower blocks ensure transactions are pro